Tripped up by life’s little details

Nicholson Baker has written several works of fiction dedicated to the proposition that “less is more.” One imagines him in his youth as that quiet, quirky fellow who sits in the back of the classroom, one eye on the blackboard, the other gazing out the window, taking it all in and rearranging it in curious little patterns of his own.

His first novel, “The Mezzanine” (1988), offered a chunk of daily life in an office building. In “Room Temperature” (1990), a father took on the bottle-feeding of his baby daughter.

Wider critical and popular attention came Baker’s way with two novels involving sex: phone sex in the case of “Vox” (1992) and prolonged climactic moments in “The Fermata” (1994). “The Everlasting Story of Nory” (1998) offered the voice and viewpoint of a 9-year-old girl.

Baker has also distinguished himself in nonfiction with books such as “U and I” (1991), a comic meditation on his fascination with John Updike; the 1996 essay collection “The Size of Thoughts”; and “Double Fold” (2001), an alarming report on the extent to which libraries have been destroying irreplaceable books, newspapers and other print materials since the advent of microfilm and the like.

His commitment to preservation led him to establish the American Newspaper Repository. Here is a man who finds value in what others have carelessly shunted aside. Something of this quality is evident in the hero of Baker’s new novel, “A Box of Matches,” who at one point declares, “I want to take care of the world.” In this novel, Baker again turns a microscope on a slice of quotidian life. The narrator, a man named Emmett who edits medical textbooks for a living, lives in Maine with his wife Claire, two children, a cat and a duck. Recently, Emmett has developed a new habit: He wakes in the early morning, goes into the living room and lights a fire in the ancient fireplace.

Emmett has discovered he likes being awake while everyone else is asleep. It’s a different kind of wakefulness -- slower, quieter, more shadowy, less abrupt than ordinary wakefulness. Rising silently from his bed, Emmett brews himself a cup of coffee in the dark kitchen, then goes to build and light the fire. It’s not just that he doesn’t want to wake the rest of the household (including the cat); he also wants to avoid shattering his own repose.

“At times, when I sit here, a long series of daytime thoughts will pass through me -- thoughts connected with work or, say, with town politics. That’s all right -- let those thoughts pass through you. You hear them coming, like a freight train with the whistle and the dinging; they take several minutes to go by, and then they’re gone. Remember that it’s very early in the morning -- early, early, early, early. Sometimes the stars are thrillingly sharp when I first get up and stand at the window on the landing of the stairs: private needle holes of exactitude in the stygian diorama. Orion’s belt is the only constellation that I recognize easily. The apportioning of stars into constellations is unnecessary: their anonymity enhances the sense of infinitude.”

More often, Emmett’s thoughts involve matters closer to home: the antics of the family’s pets; the difficulty of brewing coffee in the dark; the best way to wash a burned-on casserole dish. Some of the writing is delectably funny, including his pragmatic, hilariously detailed observations on the prudence of sitting down rather than standing up while relieving one’s bladder in the dark, and his playfully elaborated theory of what generates bad dreams:

“My theory is that they are most often simply the result of the body’s need to wake up the mind using the only tools it has available, most often in order to pee. The mind is unconscious, in a near coma, but the body has received reports of a substantial accumulation of hot urine down below decks. The body is getting insistent calls and memos describing the gravity of the hot urine situation, and passing it up to the low-brain, and the low-brain keeps putting in calls to the high-brain, but the high-brain’s phone is unplugged because it is asleep. What is the low-brain to do? It has three options: laughter, arousal, or fear. All three will elevate the heart rate, but laughter and arousal are ... less dependable. Fear it must be, then.”

A writer must be more than ordinarily talented and skillful to be able to keep the reader interested in an account of such ordinary things. Baker is certainly talented and skillful, and in this book his fans will recognize his distinctive characteristics at work: limpid writing, a detached yet affectionate focus on the simple details of mundane life and a homey, rambling style that many readers find refreshingly unassuming, though some may find it a shade too self-conscious in its modesty.

But it seems fair to say that Baker has larger goals as a writer than merely proving he can hold our attention without resorting to such time-honored devices as suspense, conflict, drama, plot or vivid character delineation. He aims at something more profound: a small, simple, transparent work of fiction that will somehow embody deeper, wider, more complex meanings. Here is where “A Box of Matches” never quite manages to leap from spark into flame. The banal is warmly illuminated in a flickering glow but seldom attains the clarity or intensity of imaginative vision.

Then, too, Baker has fed this particular fire on too much that is mere dross: It is finally not all that interesting to read in immense detail how Emmett manages to take a shower or pick up his underwear and toss it into the hamper by using the first and second toes of his bare foot. Sometimes, it is true that less can be more -- but not always.

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A Box of Matches

A Novel

Nicholson Baker

Random House: 182 pp., $19.95